Can games be used as tools?

Human beings love play. Be it board games, card games, computer games, or sports, we play different kinds of games. Games are about fun and entertainment. But can games be used as tools? Tools that help us tackle wicked problems?

Fields of View’s games are used by different local and national-level governments and civil society organizations in India and around the world for more informed public participation in civic issues. In the game design masterclass, we bring Fields of View’s expertise in game design to provide participants with a first-hand immersive experience to critically unpack games and unlock their potential.

Drawing upon Fields of View’s extensive experience in designing games as tools, the proposed Masterclass will provide participants a hands-on, in-depth understanding of how games can be used as tools and the challenges in doing so. Participants will go through the entire process – from exploring context, understanding game requirements, and how Fields of View’s City Game can be used for eliciting preferences. The focus of the workshop will be on immigration and designing tools for multi-cultural spaces.

The objective of the Masterclass will be to equip participants with the following knowledge and skills:

1. From context to tool design: How to think about a particular context, actors involved, and come up with requirements for tool design
2. Insights into use of games as tools: Where they are useful, where they are not, and how to structure thinking about the use of games
3. Games and diversity: How games can help in grappling with diversity
4. Challenges involved in three phases: preparation for the game, the game session,and post-game analysis and reporting

• We seek participants who are looking to explore the use of games as tools in the context of immigration.
• Participants need not have any prior experience in game design.

Learning Goal:
How do you analyse a problem context to evaluate whether a game is suitable or not? The ‘Problem Discovery’ and ‘Actor Mapping’, ‘Understanding resources and constraints’ and ‘Reframing problem’ methods allow you to explore a problem, prioritise, and then map different actors to see which actors would be the audience of the game, who would be partners, and who else would be involved.

Approach:
Hands-on group exercises

Learning Goal:

1. One of the goals of the Masterclass is to equip participants with the understandingof the depth and breadth of what games could potentially do. Therefore, the preliminary session will involve providing a broad overview of different games designed by Fields of View, including the Made to Order, Rubbish!, and Transport Trilemma.
2. To provide participants an overview of the entire process – you start with a problem, decide whether a game is useful or not, modify the game if required, organize a session, and analyze and report on the results. Each step involves different roles, that require different skills. The session was designed to provide participants an understanding of these different roles so that they could discover which role they wanted to take up.

Approach: Discussion and presentation